The intangibles we attach to tangible property are still rapidly multiplying. Every day there are more legal precedents, more real-estate records, more transactional data and the like. Each piece of tangible property, therefore, contains a higher component of untouchability. In advanced economies the degree of intangibility in society’s property base is spiraling upward. What is more, even industrial-age manufacturing giants now depend on ever-growing inputs of skill, R&D findings, smart management, market intelligence, et cetera. Their upgraded assembly lines are loaded with digital components busily communicating data back and forth. Their labour force is increasingly people with individuals who think for a living. All this changes the tangibility ratio in the economy’s property base, further reducing the role of touchables. Now add to this the rapid rise of what should be called “double intangibility”—that is, intangibles attached to property that is intangible to begin with. The hordes who clamored to purchase shares of Google in 2004 were prepared to buy into a company whose property and operations are almost entirely intangible, in turn protected and enhanced by other intangibles. Investors in Oracle software or in information markets, online auction sites, business models or billing systems do not worry about not owning physical raw materials, furnaces, coal, railroad sidings or smokestacks. Property thus comes in two distinct forms. In one, the intangibility is wrapped around a tangible core. In double intangibility, it is wrapped around a core that is itself intangible. Today we do not even have a word that differentiates property according to these two classes. Combine the two, however—and their rapid rates of growth—and we gain fresh insight into the massive “intangibilization” that accompanies the advance to a knowledge-base wealth system. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

The knowledge economy is a system of consumption and production that is based on intellectual capital. In particular, it refers to the ability to capitalize on scientific discoveries and applied research. The knowledge economy represents a large share of the activity in most highly developed economies. In a knowledge economy, a significant component of value may consist of intangible assets such as the value of its workers’ knowledge or intellectual property. A knowledge economy depends on skilled labour and education, strong communications networks, and institutional structures that incentivize innovation. Developing economies tend to be heavily focused on agriculture and manufacturing, while highly developed countries have a larger share of service-related activities. This includes knowledge-based economic activities such as research, technical support and consulting. The knowledge economy is the marketplace for the production and sale of scientific and engineering discoveries. This knowledge can be commodified in the form of patents or other intellectual property protections. The producers of such information, such as scientific experts and research labs, are also considered part of the knowledge economy. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was a major turning point in the treatment of intellectual property in the United States of America because it allowed universities to retain title to inventions or discoveries made with federal R&D funding and to negotiate exclusive licenses. Thanks to glocalization, the World economy has become more knowledge-based, brining with it the best practices from each country’s economy. Also, knowledge-based factors create an interconnected and global economy where human expertise and trade secrets are considered important economic resources. However, it is important to note that generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) do not allow companies to include these assets on their balance sheets. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The modern commercialization of academic research and basic science has its roots in governments seeking military advantage. The knowledge economy addresses how education and knowledge—that is, “human capital”—can serve as a productive asset or business product to be sold and exported to yield profits for individuals, businesses and the economy. This component of the economy relies greatly on intellectual capabilities instead of natural resources or physical contributions. In the knowledge economy, products, and services that are based on intellectual expertise advance technical and scientific fields, encouraging innovation in the economy as a whole. Knowledge economics are defined by four pillars: Institutional structures that provide incentives for entrepreneurship and the use of knowledge. Availability of skilled labour and a good education system. Access to information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures. A vibrant innovation landscape that includes academia, the private sector, and civil society. Example of a knowledge economy is academic institutions, companies engaging in research and development (R&D), programmers developing new software and search engines for data, and health workers using digital data to improve treatments are all components of a knowledge economy. Property in today’s U.S. economy is already surprisingly less touchable than most people imagine. A Brookings Institution study found that, as early as 1982, intangible assets even in mining and manufacturing companies accounted for 38 percent of their total market value. Ten years later—still long before the dot-com climb and crash—the intangible component represented fully 62 percent—nearly two thirds of their value. These remarkable numbers, however, hardly hint at what lies ahead. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

In the wake of the late-1990s stock-market dive, investors were told to seek safety in tangibility. However, no matter what Wall Street’s “back to fundamentals” stock pitchers may say, all advanced economies will relentlessly resume their march toward the untouchable. A key reason for this is acceleration—a change, as we have seen, in our relationship to the deep fundamental of time. As it reduces product life, hastens technical obsolescence and makes markets more temporary, today’s speed-up of change requires companies to innovate. The life and death of corporations is now based on innovation, and that means a huge growth in intangibles. What is more, innovation is contagious. Leading-edge firms force others to keep up. Even small low-tech supplier companies are compelled by their customers to adopt and redesign I.T. systems, communicate by e-mail, get on the Internet to connect with their networks, transact business electronically and do more research. In other words: Intangiblize or die. To survive today, smart companies systematically shift toward higher and higher value-added production. That strategy, too, almost always increases the need for more data, information, knowledge and other intangibles. Further, managers trained to deal with familiar business matters increasingly find themselves confronted by unfamiliar social, political, cultural, legal, environmental and technological issues of ever-increasing transience and complexity. And the first step in making decisions about novel or unusual circumstances is the call for yet more intangible data, information and knowledge. Then note the fact that in all the advanced economies, produced good account for declining fractions of spending. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

By contrast, spending is shifting toward the services that are becoming more expensive. These clearly include the high-intangibility fields like health and education, media, entertainment and financial services. Finally, there is an even more powerful reason why we should expect both kinds of intangibility—single and double alike—to become a larger and larger part of the society’s property base. That reason is simple: As we have previously seen, fast-breeding intangibles are essentially limitless. And that fact alone puts a dagger at capitalism’s throat. The assumption of limited supply, after all, is at the very heart of capitalist economics. No capitalist “law” is more sacred than the law of supply and demand. Yet if intangibles of both kinds are, for all practical purposes, in inexhaustible supply, can a maximally intangible economy coexist with capitalism? How intangible can the property base of an economy become—and still be capitalist? As the entire property base grows more intangible, hence more inexhaustible, a larger and more expansive part of it also becomes non-rival. Knowledge products as we have seen, can be exploited by millions of people at the same time without being depleted. All those music swapper-swipers downloading songs for free so not consume those notes. This change, too, has system-shaking implications. Whole industries confront death staring them in the face as new technologies make it possible to end-run the traditional intellectual-property protections—copyrights, patents and trademarks—on which they have based their very existence. Media corporations watch their movies and music instantly stolen and shared for free around the World and circulated freely on the Internet. Pharmaceutical firms, having spent hundreds of millions to research and test a new drug, see it pirated by others, who, having spent nothing to create it, peddle it at pennies on the dollar. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Other companies have their heavily promoted products copied right down to the brand name and huckstered cut-rate in street carts and at swap meets. They argue that failure to police and protect their right will dry up incentives for innovation and even destroy their industries. Their armies of well-tailored layers and lobbyists flail about in a revolutionary environment, but their proposals so far are anything but revolutionary. They are instead incremental attempts to stretch yesterday’s Second Wave legal codes to meet the challenges posed by an endless, fast-arriving succession of explosive new Third Wave technologies. Incremental stretching of old models is what lawyers do with a chortle. However one thing is clear, the battle comes out, property is going to become more, not less, intangible—and that means less easily protected. Which perfectly suits John Perry Barlow, once a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and now a leader in the fight against the further extension of intellectual property protection. “Otherwise intelligent people,” Barlow says, “think that there’s no difference between stealing my horse and stealing my song.” As property, the horse is both tangible and rival. The song is neither. Millions cannot saddle and ride the same horse. By contrast, Barlow has argued, sons, as it were, “want” to be free, and composers should not depend on copyright royalties to earn a living. Further, Barlow and others regard extending copyright and other protections as part of a larger, indeed sinister, strategy of giant firms to impose or extent content control over the Internet and other media. They argue that the new media demand radical change. On the intellectual-property issue, both sides claim they wish to preserve imagination and innovation—though the debate has reflected neither. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

The war over intellectual property shows no signs of reaching a truce. It has not yet reached its climax, because it does not yet include coming battles over the ownership of age-old ideas or concepts developed by non-Western cultures. Digital computation depends on switching between ones and zeros. If we can patent new life-forms—an idea until recently utterly unthinkable—how long before some fanatic ethnic, national or religious group shows up at WIPO, the World of Intellectual Property Organization of the United Nations, to claim it “owns” the zero? Or, for that matter, the alphabet? (Think of the royalties!) Whether we measure intangibles well or poorly, whether we protect them or not, nothing like this has ever been seen in the history of capitalism. And nothing challenges the very concept of property as deeply. However, the shift toward revolutionary intangibility is only step one in the extreme makeover of capitalism that is now under way—a makeover it might not survive. Much of the lamentation over the “decline” of manufacture is fed by self-interest and based on obsolete concepts of wealth, production, and unemployment. As early as 1962, a seminal work called The Production and Distribution of knowledge in the United States by the Princeton economist Fritz Machlup laid the foundation for an avalanche of statistics documenting the fact that more workers now handle symbols than handle things. Throughout the fifties and early sixties, in books, articles, reviews, monographs, and in at least one internal white paper prepared for IBM, a small band of futurists in the United States of America and Europe forecast the transition from muscle work to mental work or work requiring psychological and human skills. At the time, these early warnings were largely written off as too “visionary.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Since then, the shift away from manual labour toward service work and super-symbolic activity has become widespread, dramatic, and irreversible. In the United States of America today, these activities account for fully three quarters of the work force. The great transition is reflected globally in the surprising fact that World exports of services and “intellectual property” are now equal to that of electronics and autos combined, or of the combined exports in food and fuels. Because the early signals were ignored, the transition has been unnecessarily rocky. Mass layoffs, bankruptcies, and other upheavals swept through the economy as old rust-belt industries, late to install computers, robots, electronic information systems, and slow to restructure, found themselves gutted by more fleet-footed competition. Many blamed their troubles on foreign competition, high or low interest rates, overregulation, and a thousand other factors. Some of these, no doubt, played a role. However, equally to blame was the arrogance of the most powerful smokestack companies—auto makers, steel mills, shipyards, textile firms—who had for so long dominated the economy. Their managerial myopia punished those in the society least responsible for industrial backwardness and least able to protect themselves—their workers. Even middle managers felt the hot scorch of joblessness and saw their bank accounts, egos, and sometimes their marriages collapse as a result. Washington did little to cushion the shocks. The fact that aggregate manufacturing employment in 1988 was at the same level as 1968 does not mean that the workers laid off in between simply returned to their old jobs. On the contrary, with more advanced technologies in place, companies needed a radically different kind of work force as well. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The old Second Wave factories needed essentially interchangeable workers. By contrast, Third Wave operations require diverse and continually evolving skills—which means that workers laid off in between simply returned to their old jobs. On the contrary, with more advanced technologies in place, companies needed a radically different kind of work force as well. The old Second Wave factories needed essentially interchangeable workers. By contrast, Third Wave operations require diverse and continually evolving skills—which means that workers become less and less interchangeable. And this turns the entire problem of unemployment upside down. In Second Wave or smokestack societies, an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and generate jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. Since the jobs were either interchangeable or required so little skill that they could be learned in less than an hour, virtually any unemployed worker could fill almost any job. Presto! The problem evaporates. In today’s super-symbolic economy this is less true—which is why a lot of unemployment seems intractable, and neither the traditional Keynesian or monetarist remedies work well. To cope with the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes, we recall, urged deficit spending by government to put money into consumer pockets. Once consumers had the money, they would rush out and buy things. This, in turn, would lead manufacturers to expand their plants and hire more workers. Goodbye, unemployment. Monetarists urged manipulation of interest rates or money supply instead, to increase or decrease purchasing power as needed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas, without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or mobile phone merely sends dollars to other countries like China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, or elsewhere. The purchase does not necessarily add jobs at home. However, there is a far more basic flaw in the old strategies: They still focus on the circulation of money rather than knowledge. Yet it is no longer possible to reduce joblessness simply by increasing the number of jobs, because the problem is no longer merely numbers. Unemployment has gone from quantitative. Thus, even if there were ten want ads for every jobless worker, if there are 10 million vacancies and only one million unemployed, the one million will not be able to perform the available jobs unless they have skills—knowledge—matched to the skill requirements of those new jobs. These skills are now so varied and fast-changing that workers cannot be interchanged as easily or cheaply as in the past. Money and numbers no longer solve the problem. If they and their families are to survive, the jobless desperately need money, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. However, any effective strategy for reducing joblessness in a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge. Furthermore, as these new jobs are not likely to be found in what we still think of as manufacture, what will be needed is not just a question of mechanical skills—or, for that matter, algebra, as some manufacturers contend—but a vast array of cultural and interpersonal skills as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

We will need to prepare people, through schooling, apprenticeship, and on-the-job learning, for work in such fields as the human services—helping to care, for example, for our fast-growing population of seniors, providing child care, health services, personal security, training services, leisure and recreation services, tourism, and the like. We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect previously reserved for manufacture, rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector as low wage employment. Some of these service jobs, while they do require a high degree of skills (these is no such thing as “unskilled” labour) cannot stand as the symbol for a range of activities that necessarily includes everything from teaching to working at a matchmaking service or in a hospital radiology center. What is more, if, as often charged, wages are low in the service sector, then the solution is not to bewail the relative decline of manufacturing jobs, but to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions—primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing—need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to stop treating employees en masse and start thinking of them as individuals, supporting, rather than resisting, such things as work-at-home programs, flextime, and job-sharing. In brief, the rise of the super-symbolic economy compels us to reconceptualize the entire problem of employment from the ground up. To challenge outworn assumptions, however, is also to challenge those who benefit from them. The Third Wave system of wealth creation thus threatens long-entrenched power relationships in corporations, unions, and governments. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Usually one thinks of cooperation as a good thing. This is the natural approach when one takes the perspective of the players themselves. After all, mutual cooperation is good for both players in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Yet, there are situations in which one wants to do just the opposite. To prevent business from fixing prices, or to prevent potential enemies from coordinating their actions, one would want to turn the approach around and do the opposite of what would promote cooperation. The Prisoner’s Dilemma itself is named for such a situation. The original story is that two accomplices to a crime are arrested and questioned separately. Either can defect against the other by confessing and hoping for a lighter sentence. However, if both confess, their confessions are not as valuable. On the other hand, if both cooperate with each other by refusing to confess, the district attorney can only convict them on a minor charge. Assuming that neither individual has moral qualms about, or fear of, squealing, the payoffs can form a Prison’s Dilemma. From society’s point of view, it is a good thing that the two accomplices have little likelihood of being caught in the same situation again soon, because that is precisely the reason why it is to each of their individual advantages to double-cross the other. As long as the interaction is not iterated, cooperation is very difficult. That is why an important way to promote cooperation is to arrange that the same two individuals will meet each other again, be able to recognize each other from the past, and to recall how the other has behaved until now. This continuing interaction is what makes it possible for cooperation based on reciprocity to be stable. In general, sophisticated Marxism became cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies. For obvious reasons it generally stayed away from serious discussion in Russia. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Some of the criticism was profound, some of it superficial and petulant. However, none of it came from Marx or Marxist perspective. It was, and is, Nietzschean, variations on our way of life as that of “the last man.” If we look again at that psychology so influential in America, we are now in a position to see that tradition-directed, other-directed and inner-directed are just slight modifications of Weber’s three kinds of legitimacy, with other-directed (read bourgeois) derived from economic or bureaucratic rationality guided by the demands of the market or public opinion, and inner-directed identical to charismatic, to the value-giving self. Weber’s prophet is replaced by the socialist, egalitarian individual. There is not a single element of Marx in any of this, other than the absolutely unsubstantiated assertion that the socialist is the self-legislator. Discussion of the inner-directed man is empty. There are no examples that can be pointed to. Weber at least provided some examples, even though his definition may have been problematic. One wonders whether Weber’s contention that the value giver is an aristocrat of the spirit is less plausible than that of those who say that just anyone is, if he has the right therapist, or if a socialist society is constructed for him. This egalitarian transformation of Weber permitted anyone who is not to the left to be diagnosed as mentally ill. Left critics of psychoanalysis called it a tool of bourgeois conformism; one wonders, however, whether the critics are not manipulators of psychological therapy in the service of Left conformism. Adrono’s meretricious fabrication of the authoritarian and democratic personality types has exactly the same sources as the inner-directed—other-directed typology, and the same sinister implications. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

So Nietzsche came to America. His conversation to the Left was easily accepted here as genuine, because Americans cannot believe that any really intelligent and good person does not at bottom share the Will Rogers Weltanschauung, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Nietzsche’s naturalization was accomplished in may waves: some of us went to Europe to find him; he came with the emigres; and most recently professors of comparative literature have gotten heavily into the important business, getting their goods from Paris, where deconstructing Nietzsche and Heidegger and reconstructing them on the Left has been the principal philosophical metier since the Liberation. From this last source Heidegger and Nietzsche now come under their own names, treading on the red carpet rolled out for them by their earlier envoys. Academic psychology, sociology, comparative literature and anthropology have been dominated by them for a long time. However, their passage from the academy to the marketplace is the real story. A language developed to explain to knowers how bad we are has been adopted by us to declare to the World how interesting we are. Somehow the goods got damaged in transit. Marcuse began in Germany in the twenties by being something of a serious Hegel scholar. He ended up here writing trashy culture criticism with a heavy interest in pleasures of the flesh in One Dimensional Man and other well-known books. In Russian, instead of the philosopher-king they got the ideologist tyrant; in the United States of America, the culture critic became the voice of Woodstock. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

In April of 1976 the Chicago Daily News reported that Central Intelligence Agency operatives located in parts of the World where there are no journalists—central Africa, South American jungles, and so on—had been feeding totally fictitious stories to two hundred newspapers, thirty news services, twenty radio and television outlets and twenty-five publishers, all foreign owned. These stories, sometimes concerning fictitious guerrilla movements, would be reported as real in these countries and then would be picked up by the American media (fake news). Eventually you read these stories in your newspaper or saw them reported on the evening news. The purpose of the false stories was to manipulate information so that foreign governments and our government would think some event was happening when it was not or vice versa. Policy decision would be made based on this information. Public understanding would be distorted. The course of World politics would be altered. Can you recall the Mayaguez incident of 1975? Walter Cronkite announced that Ford has authorized Kissinger to undertake a rescue off the coast of Cambodia because the crew of the Mayaguez had been assaulted and seized. Kissinger sent the air force to bomb some island where the crew was presumably detained (but actually was not). Did you stop to realize at any point in the following story or in developing your opinion about it that every person and detail in it were media images describing media actions concerning other media images based on earlier media information? Tragically, this is the case with virtually all news that is carried in the media. It exists outside of your life. Often it exists outside the lives of the people who report it and the government officials who act upon it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

However, for most people sitting at home viewing the news, there is no way at all to know what is true or correct and what is not. If the news has a certain logic to it, we believe it is right. If it seems to follow from the logic of the previous say’s events also carried in the media, we can determine the logic of one day’s events.  Under such circumstances, it becomes possible for new to exist only within the media and nowhere in the real World. That was the situation that Orwell posited in 1984. Did Goldstein exist? Was there a war between Oceania and Eastasia? How could anyone possibly know, since it all concerned events in distant places, and it all arrived on television. With information confined to the media, totally separated from the context of time and place, the creation of reality is as simple as feeding it directly into our heads. An earlier lie can become what Werner Erhard calls the “ground of reality” for the newer lie. We do not need the CIA to prove the point. Any evening’s new is filled with information that we cannot possibly know is true. How could we know? If something happened, the only way to know for sure is to be present at the time and in the place of the event. If not, you are taking the information on faith. This problem of uncertainty, caused by disconnection from time and place, applies to all media. For example, I had a correspondence with anthropologist friend. Neal Daniels, concerning the importance of light in many cosmologies. I also took a trip to Micronesia and had a conversation with a man I met there. I also talked to a woman at an environmental conference, using her words to support my arguments. If any of these things happened, how can you know? How could you possibly know? Well, you could go to the American Anthropology Association, track down Neal Daniels and ask him. If he exists. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

You could write the University of Michigan and ask for a roster of attendees at that environmental conference, seeking a woman who the description I spoke of. You could do that only of the conference itself happened. However, would you? What a lot of trouble that would be. And yet, perhaps I made up those stories to fill out some points. Perhaps I made up one of them. How can you know? Whenever you engage with the media, any media, you begin to take things on faith. With books you are at least able to stop and think about what you read, as you read. This gives you some change to analyze. With television the images just come. They flow into you at their own speed, and you are hard pressed to know a true image from one which is manufactured. All of the images are equally disconnected from context, afloat in time and space. Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point with an analogy. If you open a brand-new deck of cards and start turning the cards over, one by one, you can get a pretty firm idea of what their order is. After you have gone from the ace of spades through to the nine of spades, you expect a ten of spades to come up next. And if the three of diamonds appears, you are surprised and wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. However, if I give you a deck that had been shuffled twenty times and then ask you to turn the cards over, you do not expect any card in particular—a three of diamonds would be just as likely as a tend of spades. Having no expectation of a pattern, no basis for assuming a given order, you have no reason to react with incredulity or even surprise to whatever card turns up. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered World-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the Universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent. The medieval period was a particularly clear example of this point. How comforting it must have been to have a priest explain the meaning of the death of a loved one, of an accident, or of a piece of good fortune. To live in a World in which there were no random events—in which everything was, in theory, comprehensible; in which every act of nature was infused with meaning—is an irreplaceable gift of theology. The role of the church in premodern Europe was to keep the deck of cards in reasonable order, which is why Cardinal Bellarmine and other prelates tried to prevent Galileo from shuffling the deck. As we know, they could not, and with the emergence of technocracies moral and intellectual coherence began to unravel. What was being lost was not immediately apparent. The decline of the great narrative of the Bible, which had provided answers to both fundamental and practical questions, was accompanied by the rise of the great narrative of Progress. The faith of those who believed in Progress was based on the assumption that one could discern a purpose to the human enterprise, even without the theological scaffolding that supported the Christian edifice. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Science and technology were the chief instruments of Progress, and in their accumulation of reliable information about nature they would bring ignorance, superstition, and suffering to an end. As it turned out, technocracies did not disappoint Progress. In sanitation, pharmacology, transportation, production, and communication, spectacular improvements were made possible by a Niagara of information generated by such institutions as Francis Bacon had imagined. Techocracy was fueled by information—about the structure of nature as well as the structure of the human soul. However, the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problem of information scarcity, the disadvantages of which were obvious. However, it gave no warning about the dangers of information glut, the disadvantages of which were not seen so clearly. The long-rage result—information chaos—has produced a culture somewhat like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. And what is strange is that so few have noticed, or if they have noticed fail to recognize the source of the distress. You need only to ask yourself, What is the problem in the Middle East, or South Africa, or Northern Ireland? Is it lack of information about how to grow food that keeps millions at starvation levels? Is it lack of information that brings soaring crime rates and physical decay to our cities? Is it lack of information that leads to high divorce rates and keeps the beds of mental institutions filled to overflowing? The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the World needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who complains the food he is being served in a restaurant is inedible and also that the portions are too small. However, of course, what we are dealing with here is no joke. Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before. To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than every before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The World has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences. Beside you, the smaller nanocomputer is a block twice your height, but it is easy to climb up onto it as the tourguide suggests. Gravity is less important on a small scale: even a fly can defy gravity to walk on a ceiling, and an ant can lift what would be a truck to us. At a simulated size of fifty nanometers, gravity counts for nothing. Materials keep their strength, and are just as hard to bend or break, but the weight of an object becomes negligible. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Even without the strength-enhancement that lets you overcome molecular stickiness, you could lift an object with 40 million times your mass—like a person of normal size lifting a box containing a half-dozen fully loaded oil tankers. To simulate this weak gravity, the powersuit cradles your body’s weight, making you feel as if you were floating. This is almost like a vacation in an orbital theme park, walking with stickybooks on walls, ceilings, and whatnot, but with no need for antinausea medication. On top of the nanocomputer is a stray protein molecule This looks like a cluster of grapes and is about the same size. It even feels a bit like a bunch of grapes, soft and loose. The parts do not fly free like a gas or tumble and wander like a liquid, but they do quiver like gelatin and sometimes flop or twist. It is solid enough, but the folded structure is not as strong as your steel fingers. In the 1990s, people began to build molecular machinery out of proteins, copying biology. It worked, but it is easy to see why they moved on to better materials. From a simulated pocket, you pull out a simulated magnifying glass and look at the simulated protein. This shows a pair of bonded atoms on the surface at 10 times magnification. The atoms are almost transparent, but even a close look does not reveal a nucleus inside, because it is too small to see. It would take 1,000 times magnification to be able to see it, even with the head start of being able to see atoms with your unassisted eye. How could people ever confuse big, plump atoms with tiny specks like nuclei? Remembering how your steel-strong fingers could not press more than a fraction of the way toward the nucleus of an argon atom from the air, it is clear why nuclear fusion is so difficult. In fact, the tourguide said that it would take a real-World projectile over a hundred times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet to penetrate into the atomic core and let two nuclei fuse. Try as you might, there just is not anything you could find in the molecular World that could reach into the middle of an atom to meddle with its nucleus. You cannot touch it and you cannot see it, so you stop squinting through the magnifying glass. Nuclei just are not of much interest in nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

Show of hands…do you prefer a bath or shower? 🤔

Both options are equally inviting in our bathroom at Riverside Residence 1 – and those tiles are hand-set! 🛁

And don’t worry – the other bathroom in this model is just as lovely. See more pics on our website!

Enjoy the shopistication as you’re welcomed into an spacious great room, bright dining and gourmet kitchen space, just inside of the covered porch entry.

#PlumasRanch
#CresleighHomes

Soren Viggo, a pharmacist in South Sacramento, California, makes more than $100,000 a year and owns his own homes. However, Mr. Vigo, age 30, struggles to afford the basic necessities, including groceries, utilities, insurance, and gasoline. “When you are used to spending a couple of dollars per gallon on gasoline, and the prices nearly quadruple, then you are paying a lot more, and it stressed you out,” he said. “I actually started taking the lightrail and walking to work to save money.” With gasoline prices going from costing about $300 a month, to nearly $1,000, many people who recently bought new cars and trucks are cutting costs by driving less, getting mileage-based insurance from Metromile, and are using Repair Smith for trusted auto maintenance and reapirs to making owning the vehicle of their dreams more affordable in the high inflation economy. Several people are also asking their employers if they can continue to work at home so they do not have to quit their jobs, sales their cars, and find a job closer to home because the cost of fuel every month is significantly decreasing their actual wages and living standards. Some day the high cost of fuel and the President Biden refusing to help Americans with a stimulus program is just a ploy to force people to abandon smokestack plants, and force them to buy electric cars, which they do not want and cannot afford anyway. With about $15,000 in savings and no private retirement plan, child support and medical bills, Viggo says he contemplates every purchase, from a night out on the town, to how much he can afford to spend on food. An estimated 71 percent of Americans said they know that their paycheck is not keeping up with inflation. And approximately 35 percent of people surveyed said they expect they will not be able to make ends meet month to month because budgets suggest their spending will most likely exceed anticipated costs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

 Roughly 65 percent of the American population is living pay check to pay check. And wealthier Americans are having a difficult time paying bills. In fact, 50 percent of workers warning more than $100,000 said they have little to nothing left in their bank accounts at the end of the month. The challenges people are facing in Biden’s economy is that it requires them to deplete their savings and their retirement accounts so they can afford to live. Many Americans are becoming financially vulnerable. Wages have not kept pace with inflation, which is now rising at the fastest annual pace in approximately 40 years. There is a presumption that as the cost of goods and services increases, income tends to rise as well, but that is not true. However, by any material standards, most Americas today are far better off than, say, their grandparents and great grandparents were in the 1950s, when the “new” economy began. At that time the ordinary American paid out nearly a fifth of its disposable personal income just to feed itself. In the 1950s, the average annual family income was $3,300 (2022 inflation adjusted $40,023.93), so $660 went towards food every year (2022inflation adjust $8,004.79). If we listen closely to what ordinary Americans are saying today to one another, we hear countless gripes about the rising inequality of incomes, about too much traffic and too little time, about computers that freeze up and mobile-phone conversations that break up. Listen longer, though, and a pattern emerges. We hear complaints about the growing inefficiency, greed, corruption, fecklessness or stupidity they encounter daily in the school, the office, the hospital, the media, the airport, the police station, and the polling booth—in almost all their day-to-day interactions with America’s imploding institutions. Emotions rise, however, when talk turns to values. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

 In private conversation and in political rhetoric, we hear deafening diatribes about the death of “family values,” “constitutional rights,” “moral values,” “traditional values,” “religious values” and personal and corporate ethics. What few seem to notice, however, is the direct linkage between the implosion of institutions and the implosion of yesterday’s value system. Values arise from many sources. However, in any society institutions reflect the values of their builders, and those serving the institution justify its existence by promoting values that do so. If our key institutions cannot survive in their present form, neither can the values and norms these institutions embody and promote. We should expect some values to break down and new ones to arise. However one may define vice or virtue, why should one expect a family system that now encompasses a wide variety of formats to inculcate or express precisely the same set of values that the one-size-fits-all nuclear-family system did when America was still an industrial society? Or the values of large multigenerational families common in pre-industrial agrarian societies? Why should we expect corporations that no longer depend on muscle to reflect the macho values of those companies or industries that do? These days, most big companies in the west want to be loved. The whole vocabulary of business has changed. Bosses who were once gruff, tough, macho, dominant and bold are now expected to be open, approachable, caring, persuasive and kind. Command and control systems of management, with their rigid hierarchies and strict rules have given way to flexibility, collaboration and teamwork. The is an egalitarian approach to management. The shift in values is related to the need for physical labour and the new importance of such intangibles as brands. What more and more companies are really selling these days, is the set of emotions, ideas and beliefs that their brands convey. One may quibble, but one has an important point. So, however, do those who see more sinister implications in the implosion of the value eyes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Take institutionalized sports, for example. One played by amateurs for their own amusement, and later organized more formally into clubs and leagues, it is only in recent decades that sports have become truly global institutions, a multibillion-dollar marketing industry busy selling all kinds of products—and itself largely subordinated to the needs of the television industry. Corruption in sports, of course, is hardly new. Boxers “throwing” a match and the Black Sox scandal in baseball? Ancient history. The use of drugs by Olympic athletes? Old hat. Even bribery in the megabusiness known as the Olympics has made headlines for years. However, corruption in the Little League? Among boys too young to shave? Or the chain of arrests among top athletes for drugs, rape, violence, even murder—all loudly decried by officialdom but recognized by at least one club owner as marvelous for TV ratings and financial returns? If the institution is sick, what kind of values does it propagate? Much of the seemingly bizarre behaviour around us reflect the battle raging in society today between decay and revolutionary rebirth. Throughout history, the search for extremes has been a feature of both decadence and renaissance. Today it is reflected in the application of the adjective extreme to every imaginable noun. Thus we are offered “extreme sports,” “extreme software,” “extreme fashion,” “extreme makeovers,” “extreme pumpkin carving,” and, of course, “extreme Beyonce” online, where you can learn more about her than even she knows. All this is the prelude, as it were, to “extreme celebrity culture.” Celebrities, diversity and experiments are made more and more publicly visible. Thus television programs feature more same gender couples, and alternative lifestyles. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

In print, the Paris Hilton Guess 2009 Spring/Summer ads would not have been complete without her adorable little chihuahua lounging next to her. Paris is featured stretched out on a pristine white lounge chair in a disco gold string bikini, her cute puppy seated delicately beside her. The gallery shows some of the Paris Hilton Guess 2009 Spring/Summer pictures, as well as some from her stint as the Guess girl in 2004. This was definitely one of the most stunning campaigns in history. Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and stores aimed at teenagers and young adults subtlety recreated “Sweet Valley High” with a cast of young men who looked like surfers from Orange County, California, with golden tans, sun bleached blonde hair, wash board abs, and the bodies and faces of Michelangelo’s David. This enticed young women to visit the stores and flirt with the boys, while they bought the hottest trends for their boyfriend, and also compelled young men to not only want to buy the clothes, but get their bodies beach body perfect. Since campaigns like Guess and Abercrombie & Fitch, and with the invention of social media, many guys are now feeling their pressure that young women only felt, the need to look like the model in the store window. As a result, now you see young men on social media with perfect bodies and hair, and more women wanting the bodies and faces of Paris Hilton and Beyonce, as well as their designer looks. And no matter what skin colour the people are, they all look beautiful in these fashions. Their focus is not on colour, but having the face, body, and hair of these young women and men. The Abercrombie & Fitch models all look like Brad Pitt in with various skin tones. And with the launch of 24-Hour Fitness gone wild in 2000, more men got into bodybuilding, started eating healthier and drinking Jamba Juice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Therefore, celebrity and pop culture can be healthy for people. Instead of sitting around envious of others, it inspired men and women to work hard, get in shape, and buy the latest fashions so they could feel good about themselves. All this, of course, aroused predictably extreme reactions from outraged religious groups and other bluestockings eager to restore Victorian virtue—which, as historians pull back the sheets, turns out to have been not so virtuous after all. Pleasures of the flesh is one thing, violence another. What should one make of the hit online game called Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, in which players win points for terminating specific groups, selling contraband and barbiturates and violently assaulting individuals until they end their lives on the screen? Or of rappers “about that life,” who record for companies with charming names like Murder, Inc., or Death Row and rose to fame by singing about killing specific groups of people or abusing women? And what about the German cannibal who, on the Internet, recruited a partner supposedly willing to be eaten alive so one or both of them could share a truly extreme experience? Bon appetite! (German legal institutions found themselves unprepared for this novelty, since there was no law actually banning cannibalism.) One does not need a Ph.D. to recognize that a lot of extreme behaviour is intended to jolt parents, society in general and any remaining rubes among us. Rubes, however, are increasingly hard to find. They form a tiny, dwindling group, having been replaced by a growing middle class immunized to shock through overexposure. The French used the term epater le bourgeois—meaning “to shock the middle classes.” What is different today is that the middle class now spits on itself and laughs uproariously about it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

These examples are part of a much broader testing of all the behavioural limits imposed by industrial-era institutions. And not just by the usual bohemians and activists. In the words of BlackBook magazine, “Movements in culture point to many people living the life of a misfit. It is not just the rebels and outcasts anymore, now it is the bankers, the Wall Streets, the suits and the blue collars. Where will it all lead?” What is reflected here is the decay or breakdown not just of yesterday’s institutional infrastructure but of the dying culture, value system and social character that grew up with it. The stench in the air is the smell of decadence. However, there is also a faint scent of renewal. Revolutions always wear two faces. And today is no exception. One is the angry face of disintegration. Old things tear apart and crash. The second is the smiling face of reintegration. Things, both old and new, are plugged together in novel ways. Today change is so rapid that both processes occur almost simultaneously. Along with anti-social trash and decadence, countless positive innovations are appearing as well—pro-social adaptations to the emergent knowledge economy. Even rap groups are having second thoughts. Having become big commercial enterprises that now peddle fashions, deodorants and numerous other products, some rappers have begun changing their names and image. Or as Anonymous put it: “Now we let our diplomas show, instead of pushin’ guns and blow. It may just be a temp’rary blip but rap is on a clean-up trip. Several rap groups have recently launched innovative campaigns to offer college scholarships and to register young voters—a far cry from urging them to terminate the lives of certain people. Some innovators reach into the distant pre-industrial past for models, then revolutionize them so that any resemblance to yesterday is more cosmetic than real. Matchmaking provides a case in point. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

In village life, couples are often brought together by a local matchmaker. Under urban-industrial conditions, daily life is more anonymous and contacts are more impersonal. Lonely young people make the bar scene in search of Mr. or Ms. Right. Millions are reduced to desperately searching classified ads to find a potential life partner. Today the village matchmaker is back in electronic form, as growing millions search for mates on the Web and online matchmaking becomes more sophisticated. Instead of throwing Kevin and Stacy together based on a handful of supposedly common traits, eHarmony requires a user to answer 480 questions designed to profile twenty-none characteristic that its psychologists regard as crucial to long-term success in marriage. This very process would seem at least in theory, to help individuals clarify and prioritize their own values. In a society torn between the values of the past and uncertainties of a fast-arriving future, such self-examination can itself prove useful to the individual. Matchmakers of the future may go farther and ask clients to play specially designed Sims-like online games to identify their thinking style and unconscious behavioural biases before introducing them to other clients. And if marriage results, they may charge a bonus, or arrange the wedding for an extra fee. Online services that help people locate friends or friends of friends may develop similar games to bring like-minded people together. Still others, perhaps marketed by travel agents, may introduce an individual prescreened traveler arriving in a new city to a family of equally prescreened “welcomers” for a home-cooked dinner and an evening of bowling or chamber music. Multiple online sites such as meetup.com are already brining together, face-to-face, all sorts of people, from political activists to poker player, foreign-language students to film buffs (of course, consult trusted guardians first). #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Meanwhile, recognizing the widespread hunger for community and social contact, companies such as Starkbucks and Borders promote themselves as places where people can come together. This is the old Mitteleuropa coffee shop of the past—only now providing a WiFi hot spot for your laptop so that you can communicate with the World while sipping your monkey mocha. All these are efforts to heal the pain of loneliness caused in good measure by the breakdown of familiar institutions that, until recent decades, provided places, contacts and a sense of community for lonely hearts. There are today some 300 million Visa credit card holders in the World, using their cards are some 8 million retail stores, gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and other business, and running up bills at $808,191,705.07 per day, 365 days a year. Visa is only one credit card firm. When a restaurant owner transmits your card number to Visa or American Express, the credit cad company’s computers credit the restaurant account with the appropriate amount, deduct an amount from its own books, and increases the amount you owe to it. This, however, is still primitive play. With what is called a “smart card,” the very act of handing it to a cashier who runs it through an electronic device from your bank account. You do not pay at the end of the month. Your bank account pays right away. It is like a check that clears instantaneously. Patented by Roland Moreno, a French inventor, the smart card had been pushed by French banks, along with the French postal and telecommunications services. The card, made by the Bull group, has a microchip embedded in it, and is claimed to be virtually fraud-proof. Some 10 billion are already in use. Eventually, as electronic record keeping and banking become more integrated, the store’s bank. As charges are deducted from the customer they will instantly be credited to the retailer’s account and start earning interest immediately—reducing the bank’s “float” to zero. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Simultaneously, instead of customer paying bills at fixed intervals—say once a month—rents, charge accounts, and similar regular expenses may be paid, bit by bit, bleeding electronically from one’s bank account in tiny droplets, as it were, on a minute-by-minute basis. Paralleling developments in the manufacturing sector, such changes promise to move the financial system further from batch processing to continuous-flow operation and toward the ultimate goal of real-time or instantaneity. Someday, with the even smarter cards to come, you may, if you so wish, deduct the price of a meal or a new car not from your bank account but from the equity in your homes—or even, in theory, from the value of jewelry of Japanese prints you may own. Coming down the pike is the “super-smart card,” otherwise called the “electronic bank-in-your-wallet.” Made experimentally by Toshiba for Visa International, the plastic card contains a microchip that allows the user to check one’s bank balances, buy and sell shared, make airline reservations, and perform a variety of other tasks. The new technologies also make it possible a dialectical return to a condition that existed before the industrial revolution—the coexistence of multiple currencies in a single economy. Money, like breakfast foods and a thousand other artifacts of daily life, is becoming more diversified. We may be approaching the age of “designer currencies.” Supposed a country had privately issued money alongside the official stuff….Consumers in many countries already have this parallel money—otherwise known as the pre-paid magnetic card, virtual card, digital currency, whose store of value runs down as it is used. However, because of fluctuations in value, many make an enormous about off of digital currency. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

  Once can imagine many highly specialized types of para-money. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is has successfully piloted a program that replaced food stamps issued to the needy with a smart card programmed with one month’s worth of benefits and personal identification number. The use runs it through the supermarket checkout terminal, which then verifies identification before deducting the purchase from the user’s remaining balance. The system is aimed at providing better accounting while reducing fraudulent use, illegal marketing, and counterfeiting. This is only a step away from what might be called a “Basics Card” for all people receiving transfer payments. It would help reduce the need for affordable housing by eliminating the housing agencies, which would save the government and taxpayers money because they would not longer have to pay for housing staff, maintenances, construction, or renovations. Instead, people would have a card that they could use in the private rental market to pay rent with, buy food, and access public transit. And with the economy experiencing such high inflation, this could also help many renters and homeowners stay in their houses. Another example of para-money is as close as the nearest school cafeteria. Thirty-five U.S. school districts are already preparing to launch a school lunch card system designed by Prepaid Card Services, Inc., of Pearl River, New York. Paid for weekly or monthly in advance by the parent, the kiddie-card is linked to a school computer, which keeps a running account of purchases at the lunch counter. (By stretching the imagination only a little, one can also picture a programmable card, for example, that would permit parents to customize diet. One child’s car might by invalid, say, for soft drinks. If a child had a milk allergy, the card would be invalid for foods containing dairy products, and so forth.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

One can also picture special cards issued to children that could be used in movie theaters or video stores but would be electronically unacceptable for X-rated films. All kinds of custom currencies are possible, including what might be called “programmable money.” In short, once a symbol of middle-class arrival, cards are becoming ubiquitous. U.S. federal agencies also use credit cards for both buying and collecting funds. In fact, the United States of America’s Government is the largest credit card user in the World. Nowhere in any of these transactions does anything remotely like “money” in the traditional sense change hands. Not a single coin or piece of paper money is exchanged. The “money” here consists of nothing more than a string of zeros and ones transmitted by wire, microwave, or satellite. All this is now so routine, and accepted with such confidence, that we hardly stop to doubt it. On the contrary, it is when we see large sums of paper money change hands that we suspect something is fishy. We assume that cash payment is intended to cheat the tax collector or that someone is in the drug racket. While foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation, it can certainly be helpful. From an individual’s point of view, the object is to score as well as possible over a series of interactions with others who are also trying to present the best person they can be. People are used to thinking about zero-sum interactions. In these settings, whatever one person wins, another loses. A good example is a job interview. In order to do well, the contestant must do better than the other applicant in the interviewing process. A win for one candidate is usually a loss of another. However, most of life is not zero-sum. Generally, both sides can do well, or both can do poorly. Mutual cooperation is often possible, but not always achieved. This is why the Prisoner’s Dilemma is such a useful model for a wide variety of everyday situations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

The object in life is to score well for the individual, as if having successful and pleasant interactions with others is like getting a dollar a point. It should not matter to an individual whether one does a better in life or a little worse than other individual, so long as they can collect as many “dollars” or reward points for themselves as possible. However, these instructions do not always work. People often like to see if they are doing well or poorly as a standard of comparison. The standard, which is readily available to them, is the comparison of their score with the score of their other individual. Sooner or later, one individual defects to get ahead, or at least to see what will happen. Then the other usually defects so as not to get behind. Then the situation is likely to deteriorate with mutual recriminations. Soon the players realize that they are not doing as well as they might have, and one of them tries to restore mutual cooperation. However, the other is not sure whether this is a ploy that will lead to being exploited again as soon as cooperation begins once more. People tend to resort to the standards of comparison that they have available—and this standard is often the success of the other player relative to their own success. This standard leads to envy. And envy leads to attempts to rectify any advantage the other individuals have obtained. In this form of Prisoner’s Dilemma, rectification of the other’s advantage can only be done by defection. However, defection leads to more defection and to mutual punishment. So envy is self-destructive. Asking how well you are doing compared to how well the other individual is doing is not a good standard unless your goal is to destroy the other individual. In most situations, such a goal is impossible to achieve, or likely to lead to such costly conflict as to be very dangerous to pursue. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

When one is not trying to destroy the other individual, comparing one’s success in life to another’s simply risks the development of self-destructive envy. A better standard of comparison is how well you are doing relative to how well someone else could be doing in your shoes. Given the strategy of the other individual, are you doing as well as possible? Could someone else in your situation have doe better with this other individual? This is the proper test of successful performance. TIT FOR TAT is so consistent at eliciting mutually rewarding outcomes that it attains a higher overall success rate in life than any other strategy. Of course that is as long as one is kind to others when they are kind to you and even kind to people who do not wish you will. One never wants to return evil with evil because it creates a dangerous cycle that could lead to serious consequences, such as time in prison or not getting into Heaven. So in a non-zero-sum World, you do not have to do better than another individual is doing, you have to do well for yourself. This is especially true when you are interacting with many different individuals. Letting each of them do the same or a little better than you is fine. As long as you tend to do well yourself. There is no point in being envious of the success of another individual, since in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma of long duration the other’s success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself. Congress provides a good example. Members of Congress can cooperate with each other without providing threats to each other’s standing at home. The main threat to a legislator is not the relative success of another legislator from another part of the country, but from someone who might mount a challenge in the home district. Thus there is not much point in begrudging a fellow legislator the success that comes from mutual cooperation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Likewise in business. A firm that buys from a supplier can expect that a successful relationship will earn profit for the supplier as well as the buyer. There is no point in being envious of the supplier’s profit. Any attempt to reduce it through an uncooperative practice, such as by not paying your bills on time, will only encourage the supplier to take retaliatory action. Retaliatory action could take many forms, often without being explicitly labeled as punishment. It could be less prompt deliveries, lower quality control, less forthcoming attitudes on volume discounts, or less timely news of anticipate changes in market conditions. The retaliation could make the envy quite expensive. Instead of worrying about the relative profits of the seller, the buyer should consider whether another buying strategy would be better. In his novel Being There, Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski describes a man who is born and raised in a house that he never leaves. His only contacts with humans are occasional encounters with a half-crazy maid, a crippled, senile old man confined in a room upstairs, and a television set. He watches television constantly. In middle age the hero is suddenly thrown out of the house into the city. Attempting to deal with a World which he has seen only as reproduced on television, he tries to apply what he has learned from the set. He adopts television behaviour. He tries to imitate the behaviour of the people he has seen on the screen. He speaks like them, moves as they do, imitates their facial expressions. However, because these people were only images to him, and he has never experienced real people, save for the crazies in his house, he does not know anything beyond the images. He does not know about feelings, for example. He adopts the movements of the images but cannot connect this with anything deeper inside himself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Because he has not exchanged feeling with a live human, his ability to feel has atrophied. He is a mechanical person, a humanoid. He is there physically, but like the television images, he is also not there. I would if you would be willing to try another little experiment. Please go look into a mirror. As you gaze at yourself, try to get a sense of what is lost between the mirror image of you, and you. You might ask someone to join your facing the mirror. If so, you will surely feel that other person’s presence as you stand there. However, in the reflection, this feeling will be lost. You will be left with only the image, possibly an expressive one, but only an image. What is missing from the reflection is life, or essence. Finally, place an object in front of the mirror: a hair dryer, a chair, a vacuum cleaner, a comb. What is lost? I will not say nothing is lost in the reflection, a mirror image does slightly alter the dimension and the colour of an object. However, life has not dropped out, because the object did not have any life in it. Nothing enates from it. More information is lost in the reflection of a living thing than of an object. In the living creature, there is something which can be experienced only in person, no matter how vivid the attempt at visual reproduction. The inanimate object, on the other hand, has only its form. If not perfectly, this can be reflected at least very well in the mirror image. What applies to a mirror applies even more to a photograph or a film, and still more to a television reproduction. Because television cannot coney the essence of life, it makes sense for television producers to concentrate on information in which life essence is not required for the message to be communicated. You do not need to “feel” the essence of a football player or a bomber pilot or a police attack squad to follow the action. And you surely do not need to feel the life in the product that is advertised, since the product has no life to begin with. And so football games, action dramas and product commercials, in which the image can carry the story, obtain a degree of communications efficiency that is not possible with humans, animals and plants. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Fakir Musafar has done much to research and even to act upon the ancient fascination with the surgical and subtractive. His novel, Prince of the Pain, explores radical surgical alterations of the body and its concomitant erotic/altered states of awareness in the context of a hidden society whose members are bound and controlled by physiological, mental and spiritual domination, as well as by their own peculiar fleshly conditions…very much in the spirit of our central thesis. Gnosticism posits the concept of flesh as a prison, or binding of the soul. In subtractive fetishes, the removal of flesh becomes akin to the opening of prison doors. At the extremes of the subtractive, rumors persist of secret surgical clinics in Mexico, where operations of any kind can be had at the right price. Whether or not such underground surgery actually exists, the fantasy of it is strong and pervasive, as much so as the rumors of extreme cases of force-feeding and obesification. A regular column in the tabloid-style Fetish Times is entitled “Amateur Surgeon,” written especially for those who thrill to the ultimate asceticism of amputation and surgery. Fantasies of beautiful women driven by lust to get severe cosmetic surgeries performed, are the staple fare of these types of fetishists. While you would not ordinarily believe that this intensely neurotic fixation has too many devotees, there are enough to give rise to the publication of a magazine called Amputee Times. (Offended amputees have petitioned the publish to change the title of his magazine to something on the order of Physically Challenged.) One adult actress, Long Jean Silver, has carved quite a career out of her amputated foot. While this peculiar descent into the atavistic and Neolithic mentality might seem a phenomenon restricted to the dark underworld of fetishism, it has also invaded the World of “high” art. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Will has become the key word, both Right and Left. In the past it was, to be sure, thought that will is necessary but secondary—that the cause came first. Nietzsche formulated the new way most provocatively when he said, “A good war makes sacred almost any cause.” The causes have no status; they are values. It is the positing that is essential. The transformation of violence from a means to at least a kind of end helps to show the difference, and the link, between Marxism and Fascism. Georges Sorel, the author of Reflections on Violence, was a man of Left who influenced Mussolini. The crucial thought goes back to Nietzsche by way of Bergson: If creativity presupposes chaos—hence  strife and overcoming—and man is now creating an order of peace in which there is no strife, is successfully rationalizing the World, the conditions for creativity, id est, humanity, will be destroyed. Therefore chaos must be willed, as against the peace and order of socialism. Marx himself recognized that man’s historical greatness and progress came from contradictions he had to struggle to overcome. If, as Marx promises, there are to be no more contradictions after the revolution, will there be man? Older revolutionaries were willing peace, prosperity, harmony and reason, id est, the last man. The newer breed wills chaos. Hardly anyone swallowed what Nietzsche prescribed whole, but the argument was infectious. It surely was impressive to Italian and German intellectuals in whose eyes the Fascist and Nazi “movement” found favor. Self-assertion, not justice or a clear view of the future, was the crucial element. Thus determination, will, commitment, caring (here is where this now silly expression got its force), concern or what have you become the new virtues. The new revolutionary charm became evident in the U.S.A. in the sixties, much to the distaste of old Marxists. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

There is also something of this current sympathy for terrorist, because “they care.” I have seen young people, and mature people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest reasons. They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts. Trotsky’s and Mao’s correction of Marx in calling for “permanent revolution” takes account of this thirst for the act of revolution, and its appeal lies therein. The radical students of the sixties called themselves “the movement,” unaware that this was also the language used by young Nazis in the thirties and was the name of a Nazi journal, Die Bewegung. Movement takes the place of progress, which has a definite direction, a good direction, and is a force that controls men. Progress was what the old revolutions were evidence of. Movement has none of this naïve, moralistic nonsense in it. Motion rather than fixity is our condition—but motion without any content or goal not imposed on it by man’s will. Revolution in our times is a mixture of what it was earlier thought to be and what Andre Gide called a gratuitous act, represented in one of his novels by the unprovoked and unmotivated murder of a stranger on a train. Now, as we look toward the future and explore the molecular World, we see Joel Gregory manipulating molecules in virtual reality of a simulated World using video goggles, tactile glovers, and a supercomputer. The early twenty-first century should be able to do even better. Imagine, then, that today you were to take a really long nap, oversleep, and wake up decades later in a nanotechnological World. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

In the twenty-first century, even more than in the twentieth, it is easy to make things work without understanding them, but to a newcomer much of the technology seems like magic, which is dissatisfying. After a few days, you want to understand what nanotechnology is, on a gut level. Back in the late twentieth century, most teaching used dry words and simple pictures, but now—for a topic like this—it is easier to explore a simulated World. And so you decide to explore a simulation of the molecular World. Looking through the brochure, you read many tedious facts about the simulation: how accurate it is in describing sizes, forces, motions, and the like; how similar it is to working tools used by both engineering students and professionals; how one can buy one for one’s very own home, and so forth. It explains how one can tour the human body, see state-of-the-art nanotechnology in actions, climb a bacterium, etcetera. For starters, one decides to take an introductory tour: simulations of real twentieth-century objects alongside quaint twentieth-century concepts of nanotechnology. After paying a small fee and memorizing a few key phrases (any variation of “Get me out of here!” will do the most important job), you pull on a powersuit, pocket a Talking Tourguide, step into the simulation chamber, and strap the video goggles over your eyes. Looking through the goggles, you seem to be in a room with a table you know is not really there and walls that seem too far away to fit in the simulation chamber. However, trickery with a treadmill floor makes the walk to the walls seem far enough, and when you walk back and thump the table, it feels solid because the powersuit stops your hand sharply at just the right place. You can even feel the texture of the carvings on the table leg, because the suit’s gloves press against your fingertips in the right pattern as you move. It is also like visiting the Winchester Mystery House. However, the simulation is not perfect, but it is easy to ignore the defect. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

On the table is (or seems to be) an old 1990s silicon computer chip. When you pick it up, as the beginners’ instructions suggest, it looks like it looks like the circle in the center of the spider web pattern of the Winchester Mystery House window. Then you say, “Shrink me!” and the World seems to expand. You feel as though you are falling toward the chip’s surface, shrinking rapidly. In a moment, it loos roughly like the zig zag stair case in the Winchester Mystery House, with your thumb still holding it. The World grows blurrier, then everything seems to go wrong as you approach the molecular level. First, your vision blurs to uselessness—there is light, but it becomes a featureless fog. You skin is ticked by small impacts, then battered by what feel like hard-thrown marbles. Your arms and legs feel as though they are caught in turbulence, pulling to and fro, harder and harder. The ground hits your feet, you stumble and stick to the ground like a fly on flypaper, battered so hard that it almost hurts. You asked for realism, and only the built-in safety limits in the suit keep the simulated thermal motions of air molecules and of your own arms from beating you senseless. “Stop!” gives you a rest from the suit’s yanking and thumping as you walk along the staircase, and “Standard settings!” makes the World around you become more reasonable as you move along the corridors of this mystery. The simulation changes, introducing the standard cheats. Your simulated eyes are now smaller than a light wave, making focus impossible along the uneven floor as surreal doors that open to nowhere, open to a wall, stairs that go nowhere, and hidden doors, but the goggles snap your vision into sharpness and show the atoms around you as small spheres. (Real nanomachines are as blind as you were a moment ago, and cannot cheat.) Once you get to the Y shaped staircase, you are on the surface of the 1990s computer chip, between a cell and two blocky nanocomputers. Your simulated body is 50 nanometers tall, about 1/40,000,000 your real size, and the smaller nanocomputer is twice your height. At that size, you can “see” atoms and molecules, in the most Mrs. Winchester’s favorite window. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

The simulation keeps bombarding you with air molecules, but the standard settings leave out the sensation of being pelted with marbles. A moment ago you were stuck tight to the ground by molecular stickiness, but the standard settings give your muscles the effective strength of steel—at least in simulation—by making everything around you much softer and weaker. The tourgide says that only unreal features of the simulation have to do with you—not just your ability to see and to ignore thermal shaking and bombardment, but also your sheer existence at a size too small for anything so complex as a human being. It also explains why you can see things more, something about slowing down everything around you by a factor of 10 for every factor of 10 enlargement, and by another factor to allow for your being made stronger and hence faster. And so, with your greater strength and some adjustments to make your arms, legs, and torso less sticky, you can stand, see, feel and take stock of the situation from the fourth-floor balcony. The Winchester Mystery House represents America. The American lives in a land of wonders, everything around one is in constant movement, and every movement seems as advance. Consequently, in one’s mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement. Nowhere does one see any limit placed by nature to human endeavor; in one’s eyes something that does not exist is just something that has not been tried, as with Mrs. Winchester’s architectural style. This feature of the American ethos is plain to everyone who has studied American culture, although there are wide variations of the explanation of it. Some attribute it to the immigrant nature of the population (represent by the spirits in the Winchester Mystery House Mrs. Winchester is trying to appease with the construction of her estate); some to the frontier mentality; some to the abundant nature resources of a singularly blessed land and the unlimited opportunities of a new continent; some to the unprecedented political and religious freedom afforded the average person; some to all of these factors and more. It is enough to say here that the American distrust of constraints—one might even say the American skepticism toward culture itself—offered encouragement to radical and thoughtless technological intrusion. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

Cresleigh Homes

Heaven is in your eyes. On paper, #Havenwood Model 1 is the smallest home in the community – but you’d never guess from this photo! Our homes are designed for maximum livability, and the 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home lets the whole family spread out.

Did you know all our Havenwood homes also come with a Google Home Hub and Home Mini?! “Alexa, play coffee shop jazz.” 🎶 It says, “Yes, your soul is good!”

#CresleighHomes

Dramatic as they seemed at the time, the upheavals wrought by Milken were only part of a much larger revolution. For today’s changes in the control and channeling of capital—still one of the changes in the entire economy. In Morgan’s time, and throughout the heyday of Wall Street power, the mass production of millions of identical products was symbolic of “modern times.” Today, we are standing the principle of mass production on its head. Computer-driven technologies are making it possible to turn out small runs of increasingly customized goods aimed at niche markers. Smart companies are moving from the production of long runs of increasingly customized goods aimed at niche markets. Smart companies are moving from the production of long runs of commodity products to short runs of “higher value products” like specialty steels and chemicals. Meanwhile, constant innovation shortens product life cycles. We find precisely parallel changes in the financial service industry, which is also diversifying product lines and shortening product life cycles. It, too, is spewing out a stream of niche products—new types of securities, mortgages, insurance policies, credit instruments, mutual funds, and endless permutations and combinations of these. Power over capital flows toward endless permutations and combinations of these. Power over capital flows toward firms capable of customization and constant innovation. In the new Third Wave economy, a car or a computer may be built in four countries and assembled in a fifth. Markets, too, expand beyond national boundaries. In the current jargon, business is becoming global. Once more, in direct parallel, we fund the financial services—banking, insurance, securities—all racing to “globalize” in order to serve their corporate clients. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The Third Wave economy operates at super-high speeds. To keep pace, financial firms are pouring billions into new technologies. New computers and communications networks not only make possible the variation and customization of existing products, and the invention of new ones, but also drive transaction speeds toward instantaneity. As new-style factories shift from “batch processing” to round-the-clock or “continuous flow” operations, finance follows suit, and shifts from “banker’s hours” to twenty-four-hour services. Financial centers crop up in multiple time zones. Stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies trade nonstop. Electronic networks make it possible to assemble and disassemble billions in what seems like nanoseconds. Speed itself—the ability to keep pace or stay ahead—affects the distribution of profit and power. A good example is the shrinkage of the “float” once enjoyed by banks. “Float” is the money in customers’ accounts on which the bank can earn interest while customer checks are waiting to clear. As computers accelerate the clearing process, banks gain less advantage from these funds and are forced to find alternative sources of revenue—which leads them into frontal competition with other sectors of the financial industry. As capital markets expand and interlink, from Hong Kong and Tokyo to Toronto and Paris, crossing time zones, money runs faster. Velocity and volatility both rise, and financial power in society shifts from hand to hand faster and faster speeds. Take together, all these changes add up to the deepest restructure of the World finance since the early days of the industrial era. They reflect the rise of new system of wealth creation, and even the most powerful firms, once controlling vast flows of capital, are tossed about like matchsticks in a gale. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

In 1985, America’s largest investment banker, Salomon Brothers, committed itself to build an impressive $455 million headquarters on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. By spring of 1987 Salomon became the target of a possible takeover; in October it had to shut down the municipal bond business in had dominated for twenty years; its commercial paper department went, too; 800 of its 6,500 employees were laid off; the October 1987 stock market crash slammed into the firm, and by December it was ignominiously forced to backout of the big headquarters deal at a cost of $51 million. As profits plummeted and its own stock price fell, internal schisms rent the firm apart. One faction favored sticking to its traditional role as a capital supplier to the Blue Chips. Another sought to enter the high-yield or junk bond business that Milken had pioneered and reach out to second-tier firms. Defections and chaos followed. “The World changed in some fundamental ways,” rued its chairman, John Gutfreund, “and most of us were not on top of it. We were dragged into the modern World.” The “modern World,” however, is a volatile, hostile place of the old dragons. Not only individuals and companies, but whole sectors of the financial industry totter. The collapse of more than five hundred savings-and-loans banks in the United States of America, requiring the government to pump hundreds of billions into an emergency rescue plan, reflects the rising instability. Government regulatory agencies designed for a simpler, slower smokestack World proved unable to anticipate and avert the looming disaster, as hundreds of these “thrift institutions,” caught off guard and crushed by rapidly shifting interest rates, went down in a welter of corruption and stupidity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

As the global economy grows, the financial marketplace itself becomes so vast that it dwarfs any single institution, company, or individual—even a Milken. Tremendous currents rip through the system causing eruptions and perturbations on a global scale. From the dawn of the industrial era, money power was centered in Europe. By the end of World War II, it had shifted decisively to North America, and more specifically to the southern tip of Manhattan Island. U.S. economic dominance went unchallenged for nearly three decades. From then on, money—and the power that flows from it—has been zigzagging unsteadily across the planet like a pachinko Ball gone mad. In the mid-seventies, seemingly overnight, the OPEC cartel sucked billions out of Europe, North America (and the rest of the World), and sent them zigging into the Middle East. Immediately, these petrodollars were zagged into bank accounts in New York or Zurich, zigged out once more in the form of gigantic loans to Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil, shot right back to U.S. and Swiss banks. As the value of the dollar feel and trade patterns shifted, capital zagged again to Tokyo, and zigged back into real estate, government bonds, and other holdings in the United States of America—all at speeds that stagger the experts struggling to understand what is happening. With each such lurch of capital comes a corresponding redistribution of power at the global and local levels. As oil money fire-hosed into the Middle East, Arab nations began to wield a huge cudgel in international politics. Israel found herself increasingly isolated in the U.N. African countries, needing oil and eager for foreign aid from the Arabian people, broke off diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Petrodollars began to influence the media in various parts of the World. And the lobbies of hotels in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait were jammed with attache-case-carrying supplicants—salesmen, bankers, executives, and wheeler-dealers from around the World, pleading ignominiously with this or that spurious relative of a royal family for contacts and contracts. However, by the early 1980s, as OPEC unity fell apart and oil prices collapsed, the frenzy waned, and so did Arab political power. Today the horde of supplicants, often representing the largest banks and corporations in the World, mill about the lobbies of hotels like the Okura or the Imperial in Tokyo. The growing volatility of the World capital market, dramatized by such huge swings and punctuated by stock market crashes and recoveries, as in the “Two Octobers”—October 1987 and October 1989—are a sign that the old system is increasingly going out of control. Old safety mechanisms, designed to maintain financial stability in a World of relatively closed national economies, are as obsolete as the rust-belt World they were designed to protect. Globalized production and marketing require capital to flow easily across national boundaries. This, in turn, demands the dismantling of old financial regulations and barriers erected by national removal of these barriers in Japan and in Europe has negative consequences as well. The result is a larger and larger pool of capital instantly available anywhere. However, if this makes the financial system more flexible and helps it overcome localized crises, it also raises the ante, escalating the risk of massive collapse. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Modern ships are built with watertight compartments so that a leak in one part of the hull cannot flood and sink the entire vessel. Liberalization of capital so that it can flow freely is the equivalent of eliminating these fail-safe compartments. Essential for the advance of the economy, it increases the danger that a serios collapse in one country will spread to others. It also threatens the power of one of the most important economic institutions of the industrial age: the central bank. Until a decade or so ago, a relative handful of central bankers and government officials could decisively affect the price of everything from Danish hams to Datsun cars by manipulating interest rates and intervening in foreign currency markets. Today this is becoming harder for them to do. Witness the explosive growth of the “forex,” or foreign exchange, markets and the electronic networks that facilitate them. Only a few years ago the Bank of Japan could influence the yen-dollar ratio by buying or selling 16 billions’ worth of dollars. Today such sums are laughable. An estimated 200 billion dollars’ worth of currencies are traded every day in London, New York, and Tokyo alone—more than a trillion a week. (Of this, no more than 10 percent is associated with World trade; the remaining 90 percent is speculation.) Against this background the role of individual central banks, and even of the major ones acting in concert, is limited at best. Because power is rapidly shifting out of the hands of central bankers and the governments they nominally represent, we hear urgent calls for new, more centralized regulation at supra-national level. These are attempts to control a post-smokestack financial system by using essentially the same tools used during the smokestack age—merely raised to a higher power. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

In Europe some political leaders call for the elimination of national currencies and the creation of a single all-European central bank. France’s former finance minister Edouard Ballladour and West Germany’s foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher are joined by many French, Belgian, and Italian officials in pushing for this higher level of centralization. Though still some time off in the future, says economist Liane Launhardt of Commerzbank A.G. in Frankfurt: “We will eventually have to have a European central bank.” Against this supra-nationalism, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain has waged a rear-guard action in defense of national sovereignty. However, even at the World level we begin to see increasingly attempts by the G-7, the group of seven largest industrial economies, to synchronize and coordinate their policies with respects to currencies, interest rates, and other variables. And academics and some financial experts argue for a “World central bank.” If the globalizers win, it will mean further weakening of the power of existing central banks—the key regulators of capital in the noncommunist World since the dawn of the smokestack age. The decades to come will therefore see a titanic power struggle between the globalizers and the nationalists over the nature of new regulator institutions in the World capital markets. This struggle reflects the collision between a moribund industrial order and the new global system of wealth creation that is replacing it. Ironically, however, these proposals to centralize control of global finance at a higher level run counter to developments at the actual level of economic production and distribution, both of which are becoming more dispersed, diverse, and decentralized. This suggests that the outcome of this historic power struggle may satisfy neither nationalists nor globalists. History, full of surprises, could force us to reframe the issues in novel ways and to invent wholly new institutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

One thing seems clear. When the battle to reshape global finance reaches its climax in the decades ahead, many of the greatest “powers that be” will be overthrown. Yet even these upheavals in the distribution of World money-power reveals less than the whole story. They will be dwarfed in history by a revolution in the nature of wealth itself. For something odd, almost eerie, is happening to money itself—and all the power that flows from it. So many industrial-age institutions are racing toward implosion. Leaders who attempt to redesign old institutions face denial, stubborn resistance and conflict. Innovators who seek to create new institutions or organizations face skepticism. Both need guts, political skill, tenacity, a sense of timing and commitment. They need allies. Externa crisis—and even internal recognition of it—is not enough to bring about transformation in the absence of a persuasive, plausible, nonutopian vision of an alternative. And it is precisely here that social imagination is called for. Fortunately, there are tested tools that can help unleash it. One of these is the addition or subtraction of functions. For example, the university was originally a place to teach students. In the nineteenth century, the University of Berlin added research to its core functions and became a model for other universities around the World. In the twentieth century, innovators did the reverse, subtracting students from the model of a research university, leaving only the research. The result was a new type of institution called a think tank. Recently, a wave of adding and subtracting functions has swept through American industry under the rubric of outsourcing and insourcing. A corporate transformation also occurs when existent functions are either radically expanded or reduced. Big-enough changes in scale can add up to qualitative transformation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

In a World in which borders have become more porous, the distinction between foreign and domestic affairs has broken down. Should each country continue to have a foreign ministry? In universities, should neatly bounded academic disciplines be permanent? Of should disciplinary departments be replaced by temporary, problem-oriented teams comprising students and professors with diverse specialties? In all sectors of society—private, public, and civil—we will need completely new models of organization—strange combinations of networks within bureaucracies, bureaucracies within networks, checkerboard organizations, organizations flexible enough to double or halve their capacity overnight, organizations that survive by forming temporary “coalitions of the willing” to accomplish specified goals. Preventing systemic institutional implosion will require transforming not just big corporations and governmental departments but every level of the economy and society, from small business to churches, local unions and local NGOs. On a smaller, slower scale this happened before, when the industrial revolution was still young and needed new, post-agrarian institutions, from department stores and police forces to central banks and think tanks. Innovators arose from the most unexpected places and created them against far greater resistance and odds than those posed in today’s societies transitioning beyond industrialism. And it is here that the United States of America is perhaps the strongest. It has fewer lengthy traditions to protect. It has ethnic and cultural diasporas that bring ideas to America from all over the World. Its people are among the most entrepreneurial in the World—and not just in business. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

It has intellectual entrepreneurs, activist entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs, religious entrepreneurs, academic entrepreneurs. And, unlike societies that suppress individual entrepreneurialism, it preaches a gospel of change that celebrates it. However, America is not alone in innovational resources. Never in history have there existed more educated people committed to making change. Never have there been so many different kinds of institutions, or more powerful tools for matching, mixing, simulating, designing and testing new institutional models. Fortunately, we are beginning to see a new “meta-intuition” appear—a handful of laboratories for social invention and entrepreneurship—mainly focused on the civil-society sector, which is bubbling with energy and imagination. Some universities now teach courses in social invention. Some foundations offer modest awards for the best ideas. The U.S. Patent Office has approved patents for new business models. However, should not there be an imaginative new form of patent for equally creative social models? Innovation will either be sparked by topside leadership ready to transform existing institutions or it will explode from the bottom, as more and more industrial-age institutions collapse and systemic implosion nears. Advanced economies are honeycombed with millions of social inventors, innovators, organizational risk-takers, dreamers and practical men and women, better educated, with access to more knowledge from everywhere, armed with the most powerful knowledge tools known to the human race and bursting for the chance to invent a better tomorrow. They are all over the World, ready to remake it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

As for the United States of America, it is especially rich with innovative, ever-inventive, try-it-out, go-for-it people eager to test new idea and new models. Even the Sepulveda Solution—the crazy, wonderful juxtaposition of a car wash offering the latest best sellers, how-to books and the works of Cervantes and Garcia Marquez; Dante, Darwin and Du Bois; Whiteman and Wollstonecraft; Aristotle and Plato; Machiavelli and Rousseau; John Locke; and Thomas Paine’s ever-inspiring Rights of Man. A car wash, even with a bookstore, will not change America, let alone the World. However, thousands, indeed millions, of creative adaptations to the emerging markets, culture and conditions of the knowledge economy will. If a car wash can also be a bookstore, the range of options for preventing an institutional implosion may be limited only by our social imagination. The time has come to free it. With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-Worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy. The United Sates of America is the only culture to have a Technopoly. It is a young Technopoly, and we can assume that it wishes not merely to have been the first but to remain the most highly developed. Therefore, it watches with a careful eye Japan and several European nations that are striving to become Technopolies as well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

To give a date to the beginnings of Technopoly in America is an exercise in arbitrariness. It is somewhat like trying to say, precisely, when a coin you have flipped in the air begins its descent. You cannot see the exact moment it stops rising; you know only that it has and is going the other way. Huxley himself identified the emergence of Henry Ford’s empire as the decisive moment in the shift from technocracy to Technopoly, which is why in his brave new World time is reckoned as BF (Before Ford) and AF (After Ford). Because of its drama, we are tempted to cite, as a decisive moment, the famous Scopes “monkey” trial held in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925. There, as with Galileo’s heresy trial three centuries earlier, two opposing World-views faced each other, toe to toe, in unconcealed conflict. And, as in Galileo’s trial, the dispute focused not only on the content of “truth” but also on the appropriate process by which “truth” was to be determined. Scopes’ defenders brought forward (or, more accurately, tried to bring forward) all the assumptions and methodological ingenuity of modern science to demonstrate that religious belief can play no role in discovering and understanding the origins of life. William Jennings Bryan and his followers fought passionately to maintain the validity of a belief system that placed the question of origins in the words of their god. In the process, they made themselves appear ridiculous in the eyes of the World. Almost seventy years later, it is not inappropriate to say a word in their behalf: These “fundamentalists” were neither ignorant of nor indifferent to the benefits of science and technology. They had automobiles and electricity and machine-made clothing. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

They used telegraphy and radio, and among their number were men who could fairly be called reputable scientists. They were eager to share in the largesse of the America technocracy, which is to say they were neither Luddites nor primitives. What wounded them was the assault that science made on the ancient story from which their sense of moral order sprang. They lost, and lost badly. To say, as Bryan did, that he was more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks was clever and amusing but woefully inadequare. The battle settled the issue, once and for all: in defining truth, the great narrative of inductive science takes precedence over the great narrative of Genesis, and those who do not agree must remain in an intellectual backwater. Studies of nanotechnology are today in the exploratory engineering phase, and just beginning to move into engineering development. The basic idea of exploratory engineering is simple: combine engineering principles with known scientific facts to form a picture of future technological possibilities. Exploratory engineering looks at future possibilities to help guide our attention in the present. Science—especially molecular science—has moved fast in recent decades. There is no need to wait for more scientific breakthroughs in order to make engineering breakthroughs in nanotechnology. Exploratory engineering has an outer box which represents the set of all the technologies permitted by laws of nature, whether they exist or not, whether they have been imagined or not. Within this set are those technologies that are manufacturable with today’s technology, and those that are understandable with today’s science. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Textbooks teach what is understandable (hence teachable) and manufacturable (hence immediately practical). Practical engineers achieve many success by cut-and-try methods and put them into production. Exploratory engineers study what will become practical as manufacturing abilities expand to embrace more of the possible. Each of these types of exploratory engineering relates most familiar kinds taught in school: this “textbook engineering” covers technologies that can be both understood (so they can be taught) and manufactured (so they can be used). Bridge-building and gearbox design fall in this category. Other technologies, however, can be manufacture but are not understood—any engineer can give examples of things that work when similar things do not, and for no obvious reason. However, as long as they do work, and work consistently, they can be used with confidence. This is the World of “cut-and-try engineering,” so important to modern industry. Bearing lubrication, adhesives, and many manufacturing technologies advance by cut-and-try methods. Exploratory engineering covers technologies that can be understood but not manufactured—yet. Technologies in this category are also familiar to engineers, although normally they design such things only for fun. So much is known about mechanics, thermodynamics, electronics, and so forth that engineers can often calculate what something will do, just from a description of it. Yet there is no reason why everything that can be correctly described must be manufacturable—the constraints are different. Exploratory engineering is as simple as textbook engineering, but neither military planners nor corporate executive see much profit in it, so it has not received much attention. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The concepts of molecular manufacturing and molecular nanotechnology are straightforward results of exploratory-engineering research applied to molecular systems. As we observed above, if anyone had bothered, the basic ideas could have been worked out sixty years ago. However, now, with the threshold of nanotechnology approaching, attention is beginning to focus on where the next steps lead. If technology keeps advancing, and competition practically guarantees that advanced will continue, nanotechnology seems to be where the World is headed. It will open both a huge range of opportunities for benefit and a huge range of opportunities for misuse. We will paint scenarios to give a sense of the prospects and possibilities, but we do not offer predictions of what will happen. Actual human choices and blunders will depend on a range of factors and alternatives beyond what we can hope to anticipate. Television is another interesting form of technology. The attempt to push the information through television foes flat. It does not work. The viewer is left to evaluate aspects of the experience that television can capture, and these reduce to objective facts like the arguments among opposing viewpoints as to the best use of this area. People need homes. The developer has a right to profit. The tax base of the community is affected. Meanwhile, the ecologists speak of flyways and breeding grounds, endangered plants and nearly extinct creatures. A whole world of sensory information has been abandoned, and yet it is in this World that real understanding of marshes exists. And without the understanding who can care about the marsh? Taxes become more important. Birds can be seen elsewhere. Images of mud and reeds do not inspire the mind, especially compared with the hard facts of our World. People need jobs building hoses. Nobody ever “uses” swamps anyway. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

It is possible that viewers of that program had a greater feeling for swamps when the swamps resided totally in their imaginations, where, at least, they had the richness that fantasy can creature. On television, the fantasy is destroyed and the perspective is flattened. What was true for this news report is true for all television programs that concern nature. Seeing the forests of Borneo on television makes one believe that one knows something of these forests. What one knows, however, is what television is capable of delivering, a minute portion of what Borneo forests are. It cannot make you care very much about them. When Georgia-Pacific proceeds to cut down hundreds of thousands of acres of Borneo forests, at it has so many others in the Pacific Basin, one remains unmoved. The wood is needed for homes. The objective data dominate when only objective data can be communicated. Meanwhile, sitting in our dark rooms ingesting images of Borneo forests, we lose feeling even for the forests near our homes. While we watch Borneo forests, we are not experiencing neighbourhood forests, local wilderness or even local parks. As forests experience reduces to television forest, out caring about forests, any forests, goes into dormancy for lack of direct experience. And so the lumber company succeeds in cutting down the Borneo forest, and then, near to home, it also succeeds in building a new tract of condominiums where a local park had been. In my opinion, the more the natural environment is conveyed on TV, the less people will understand about it or care about it, and the more likely its destruction becomes. Ecologists would be wise to abandon all attempts to put nature on television. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Programs concerned with the arts, programs concerned with many religions and all programs concerned with non-Western cultures are similarly distorted by television’s inability to convey their sensual aspects. Theater music, dance, if they are to be fully understood and appreciated, require exquisitely fine visual and aural reproduction as well as exquisitely tuned sense reception in the viewer. The experience of them on television is only the barest approximation of the direct experience of the performance. The information loss is enormous, and it is the most critical and subtle the information that is lost. Some people argue that television delivers a new World of art to people in, say, Omaha, who might otherwise never see the Stuttgart Ballet or the New York Philharmonic. They say this stimulates Ballet or the New York Philharmonic. They say this stimulates interest in the arts. I find this very unlikely. Information received with only two senses, especially in the limited range of television, and considering the other dulling aspects of the medium, is simply not the same at the receiving end as it would have been in the theater or concert hall. On television the depths are flattened, the spaces edited, the movements distorted and fuzzed-up, the music thinned and the scale reduced. This would have to affect the level of understanding and limit the quality of the experience. The human senses cannot experience what is not there. If the television delivers a drastically reduced version of an art experience, then this is what the senses must deal with, and if one has never directly experienced the real thing, how is one to know that the reality is richer than the television version? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Reading Moby Dick as a comic book does not inspire one to read Moby Dick in the original. Quite the opposite. And so seeing the Stuttgart Ballet performing on television leaves one with such a reduced notion of ballet as to reduce the appeal of the ballet itself. The result is likely to be boredom and switched channels. To say that such a program stimulates new interest in arts is to behave. And so it goes in all areas. The religions of the World, from Tibetan Buddhism to many forms of Catholicism, are deeply rooted in the rich interplay of the human mind and senses. On television they must be understood through fixed cerebral channels, leaving description, but no feeling. The same can be said for must cultures of the World still immersed in the sensory relationships between human and environment. There is no way to effectively convey African cultures, as was mentioned, through images disconnected from the other senses, and certainly not through logical analysis. More often than not these cultures and others are sensually or mystically based and can be deeply understood only in those terms. Unfortunately, television makes the effort to explain them anyway, just as it claims to convey nature, the arts, the news and the details of human feeling. Human beings who view these attempts are led to believe that these fuzzy little pellets of information about our rich, subtle, complex and varied World constitute something close to reality. What they really do is make the World as fuzzy, coarse, and turned-off as the medium itself. If flesh feels inherently good, the more flesh must feel that much better! This simple idea emerges out of a kind of folk-wisdom that stretches back to the Paleolithic era. A similar cultural predisposition toward the opposite extreme of thinness certainly pervades post-industrial culture. The two extremes are inextricably linked by a core fascination with the power of food…a fixation which ranges back past the era of human evolution to the roots of mentality in the higher primates, in which eating becomes the key drive of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The force-feeder control the victim bound by the magnitude of their own flesh, the surgeon or anorectic controls the subject’s bodily integrity. The consumptive fetish, as we might call the two combined back into their root, is the primordial source of all sado-masochistic behavioural patterns, since food and flesh are the most primary instruments of control, of life and death themselves. It is assumed that the chronological story of the World is in the primeval state and evolutionarily stable. However, cooperation based on reciprocity can gain a foothold through two different mechanisms. First, there can be kinship between mutant strategies, giving the genes of the mutants some stake in each other’s own success, thereby altering the payoff of the interaction when viewed from the perspective of the gene rather than the individual. A second mechanism to overcome total defection is for the mutant strategies to arrive in a cluster so that they provide a nontrivial proportion of the interactions each has. And if the probability that interaction between two individuals will continue is great enough, then TIT FOR TAT is itself evolutionarily stable. Moreover, its stability is especially secure because it can resist the intrusion of whole clusters of mutant strategies. Thus cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in a predominately noncooperative World, can thrive in a variegated environment, and can defend itself once fully established. A variety of specific biological applications of this approach follows from two of the requirements for the evolution of cooperation. The basic idea is that an individual must not be able to get away with defecting without the other individuals being able to retaliate effectively. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

 The response requires that the defecting individual not be lost in a sea of anonymous others. Higher organisms avoid this problem by their well-developed ability to recognize many different individuals of their species, but lower organism must rely on mechanisms that drastically limit the number of different individuals or colonies with which they can interact effectively. The other important requirement to make retaliation effective is that the probability of the same two individual meeting again must be high. When an organism is not able to recognize the individual with which it had a prior interaction, a substitute mechanism is to make sure that all of its interactions are with the same player. This can be done by maintaining continuous contact with the others. This method is applied in most mutualisms, situations of close association of mutual benefit between members of different species. Ideology today, in popular speech, is, in the first place, generally understood to be a good and necessary thing—unless it is bourgeois ideology. The evolution of the term was made possible by the abandonment, encouraged by Nietzsche, of the distinction between true and false in political and moral matters. Men and societies need myths, not science, by which to live. In short, ideology became identical to values, and that is why it belongs on the honour roll of terms by which we live. If we examine Weber’s, of course, meant that all societies or communities of human beings require such violent domination—as the only way order emerges from chaos in a World with no ordering force in it other than man’s creative spirituality—while Marxists still vaguely hope for a World where there are values without domination. This is all that remains of their Marxism, and they can and do fellow-travel with Nietzscheans a goodly bout de chemin. One sees their plight in the fact that ideology no longer has its old partner, science, in their thought, but stands in lonely grandeur. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Ready to fall in love? A Cresleigh Home is ideal for those looking to take advantage of perfectly balanced spaces, floor plans that are perfect for entertaining so the chef always feels included in the events at all times, and a kitchen, dining, and living room arraged to look out into the backyard so one can keep an eye on their children.

We certainly get that feeling when we sit fireside 🔥 in the backyard of our Residence 1 home at #CresleighMeadows! Luxury doesn’t have to be fussy- it just has to be effortlessly comfy! 🌟

Your will enjoy the outdoor living, and at nearly 2,000 square feet, the house is spacious allow you to continue growing into your home for years to come.
#PlumasRanch
#CresleighHomes